In Valid Logic

Last weekend, I was working on reinstalling Debian Lenny on one of my servers when I want into the same issue I’ve encountered time and time again. I have a couple of Dell PowerEdge 1950s which use Broadcom network cards, and the Broadcom firmware is classified as non-free by Debian and not included on the network install CD (maybe others, thats the only one I use). For some reason, Ubuntu includes the drivers, but Debian doesn’t. My eye-rolling aside, in this case I preferred Debian over Ubuntu.

Now the problem… I’m about 45 minutes away from my servers. On all my own servers, one thing I had decided is an absolute must to have the remote management cards (DRAC5 in my 1950s) which supports remote console and virtual media. This is awesome for remotely reinstalling an operating system, but not so good when it asks you for an additional driver by removable media… and of course, when it is your network card driver.

I don’t quite recall how I got through it last time, though it involved a fair amount of coursing, particularly because the installer asks for the .fw file when it really just wants the .deb.

This time around, I found a nicely prepared ISO with the deb on it, however the DRAC only support one virtual CDROM, and it didn’t seem to find it if I unmounted the installation media and mounted the ISO with the deb on it.

There was also some information about PXE booting with the driver, but that sounded like an overly complicated solution.

My route? If it can’t find it on the virtual cdrom, try the virtual floppy! The deb is only 102kb, so just fire up Magic ISO, create a new floppy image, copy it in, and save it. Mount it to the virtual floppy and problem solved.

Encounter the same issue? Download my floppy image!

Today, all the Telligenti have been buzzing regarding the recent release of Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise. From telligent.com:

"Telligent, a leader in community, collaboration and social analytics software, today announced the availability of version 5.0 of Telligent Community (previously Community Server) and version 2.0 of Telligent Enterprise (previously Community Server Evolution). The latest versions of Telligent’s community and collaboration software represent the company’s ongoing commitment to innovation and enterprise collaboration."

Finally, after months of feverish development, we’ve reached the point of a release for what is probably our biggest release in history. Our v5.0 is unlike any of our previous major releases. We have a completely new permissions system, revamped groups, new search, new email templating, and new widget based theming.

Soon I’ll be having a series of posts going over some of the bigger technical points in some of my areas of expertise. In particular with this release, I’d worked on the search implementation and the new email templating.

In previous versions of CS, we had two implementations of search, the default Search Barrel and the more powerful Enterprise Search, which was built on Lucene.Net. Now, we’ve changed the search to be much easier to extend and change out. Previously, search was tightly coupled to the index. You couldn’t easily add new types to Enterprise Search or index additional fields.

Our new search is comprised of a series of mappers, which define how to convert an object into a searchable document, and define your own content handlers, which are used to grab objects that need to be indexed, have them mapped, and passed over to the index. You can easily build on top of existing mappers, create mappers for new types, and add new content handlers to the search process. Additionally, the search is broken out into indexing and search, allowing you to easily create your own implementations. Our included implementation is now based on Solr. Why Solr? A better question is why not Solr? It did everything we wanted and then some. It is feature packed, high performance, and super reliable. With it, we were also able to easily build in thread collapsing. Tired of the search results all being messages from the same thread? Now we can collapse down the results, combining all the posts from a single thread into just one result.

What’s new with emails? Over time, we found the old email templates to be too limiting. We had one big XML file containing all the emails, people often ran into confusion when editing HTML emails (since they had to be XML escaped), and the default tokens were limiting depending on the types of customizations you’d want to make. Our new emails are entirely based on nVelocity. If you are familiar at all with the theming in Graffiti, you will be right at home in the new email templates. The templates produce the mime documents that get sent out, allowing you do manipulate the message headers, attachments, and body content. Instead of providing a fixed set of tokens like [PostDate], you get the actual objects. You can now use $post.PostDate, or call $post.PostDate.ToString() and pass in a custom formatter. Want to do more? Can easily create Chalk modules to add new macros, or TemplateModules to manipulate the nVelocity context before templating, or the processed mime object after processing (useful for adding binary attachments and such).

Want to know more? Keep posted.

A while ago, I’d read a prediction about Citrix eventually dropping the Xen hypervisor. The article and site mostly focus on aspects of XenApp and VMware’s VDI. The prediction was that Citrix drop Xen in favor of Hyper-V and focus more on tools, saying they’re selling the tools already, not the hypervisor. Today, it looks like that prediction may be on its way to becoming true.

Today, Citrix announced that XenServer will now be free, and that Citrix is now focusing on building tools… but not just for Xen, but also for Hyper-V.

Additionally, today RedHat unveiled some of its virtualization plans. They have some big plans for its acquisition of Qumranet, developers of KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine), last September. Its plans include in elimination of Xen and migration to being a strong contender with KVM.

It looks like 2009 will be a pretty big year for virtualization. In reading online, a lot of general opinion is that for open source server virtualization, people will be dropping Xen in favor of KVM. When RedHat acquired Qumranet, their intent was obvious. Since then, Fedora has also dropped Xen from its standard support, as well as Ubuntu 8.10, which seems to be focusing on KVM now as well. If the major distros are dropping mainline Xen support, and Citrix is making XenSource free, what will drive innovation with Xen? Citrix will be focusing on tools. They can let Microsoft innovate on Hyper-V and then they just need to do the tools. One of the main confidence boosters for people is that KVM is already in the Linux kernel, making almost all distributions instantly compatible, while Xen has struggled to get into the kernel.

A few weeks ago, I’d installed Proxmox Virtual Environment and was quite impressed with it. Proxmox is a free packaged system that supports KVM virtualization. I didn’t really benchmark its Windows guest performance, but it fired up and ran quite smoothly. Had virtual environment installed and running VMs in only 15 minutes.

For me, I’m somewhat unsure about the Xen vs KVM debate. XenServer is fairly nice and has a rich API to go along with it and a pretty decent management app. KVM is less mature, but gaining a lot of momentum. Virtualization is a market I’m always interested in and like to dabble with each release that comes out of VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, though KVM is certain catching my eye.

For a while now, I’ve run a small virtual server business, hosted on a couple of servers that I own in a local Sacramento datacenter.

Currently, I’m looking for a few additional customers. I don’t actively recruit, however looking to fill some extra capacity I have.

Some information:

• Windows Server 2008 or any linux distro available.
• Virtualization with XenServer 5.
• Low load servers, not oversold or overcommitted.
• Top quality bandwidth. I don’t like crappy connectivity. Currently get bandwidth through XO and Verizon, soon moving to a new datacenter with Level3 and XO.
• Hardware firewall and hosted anti-spam solution.
• Shared SQL Server 2005 (soon to be moved to 2008) server
• Manage your sites with DotNetPanel, email with SmarterMail
• All servers are Dell PowerEdge 1950s, 2x quad core processors, 8-16gb RAM (upgrading all to 16gb soon)

Some other important points:

• Your virtual server is your own responsibility. You break IIS, you fix it!
• No set limits for number of domains/email accounts, but be reasonable.

I usually cater to a more technical crowd. Developers can appreciate the quality, understand they get what they pay for, and are pretty much self-managing. My current users really don’t come to me for that much.

Plans are either:

• 512mb RAM
• 20gb space
• 150gb bandwidth
• $50/month for Linux, $70/month for Windows

Or,

• 1024mb RAM
• 40gb space
• 300gb bandwidth
• $100/month for Linux, $120/month for Windows

Space is limited, as I only have a couple servers. I’m not buying any additional ones, so not going beyond my current capabilities. Once the space fills up, it is done.

Hosting with me is not right for everyone. If you need a lot of support, then it may be better to look elsewhere. I don’t run this as a full-on business where I cater to all the customers needs. That said, if you know what you’re doing, want a quality virtual server on quality hardware and connectivity, then I’m just what you’re looking for.

If you’re interested, please contact me directly.

This morning I woke up to this email waiting for me:

From: xxx@googlemail.com
To: me
Subject: Regarding your domain name whobroke.us

Hi,

I wondered if you would be interested in buying the .COM version of your domain name whobroke.us for $195 ?
Let me know.
Shawn.

So I have this domain name, whobroke.us. Last January I went on a domain-spree and thought it could be a political domain or something like that. It is now pending expiration, since I never did anything with it. But I get this email today from someone wanting to sell me the .com version. Ok…

So I go over to GoDaddy just to look up the domain, and low-and-behold, the domain is available… I could get it for $9.99. On the offchance, I though maybe he meant whobrokeus.com, so I looked it up and it is available as well.  I sent him a reply, however I haven’t heard back yet. My guess is it is an automated script since a few hours after I emailed him, I received another message (the same one) from him again.

I guess domain resellers now are so desperate that they’ll try and sell you readily available domains at a huge mark up. Hey, someone agrees to buy it for $195, run out and buy it for $10, pocket $185!

Doing some browsing (I do a lot of that I guess), I stumbled across this site called Office Snapshots which profiles the office space of today’s tech companies. Basically it allows geeks to check out the digs, gadgets, and stylish offices of the latest start ups.

While browsing the list of companies, I realized something interesting. A lot of these companies are the trendy web 2.0 companies where you have to squint and turn your head sideways while reading the name to see how it is pronounced. And of course, these companies are VC backed. The thing I find odd is that the VC backed ones have yet to create a revenue stream, and yet they’re dumping all this cash into their offices?

I mean, too many of them are located within San Francisco, in a high real estate area, have taken $15+ million in VC funding, and are filled with today’s latest trends in hip office furniture and desks. Is it some sort of start up street cred? They do it to attract potential employees? Impress customers? Really, I don’t get what the purpose is.

I would expect that kind of impressive office space from some of the established companies like Google, Microsoft, or Apple. You know, the ones who actually generate income. But start-ups?

Firstly, if I worked for or was looking to work for a company like that, I’d be looking at it thinking ok, they got $15 mil from a VC, they’ve yet to generate income, and are blowing their wad on offices? Does this sound like a financially stable company? Or even if they are still doing ok despite their office decisions, does this sound like the kind of company I’d work for? Is it wise use of their money? What is the ROI on trendy office space?

If I was looking at it as a customer (as I do with one of them), I’d be thinking why the hell are you blowing that chunk on office digs when you service still sucks. It would be better spent on support, improving your service, or hiring talent to transform a cool service into a sustainable business.

Not as if I was partial or anything, but I much prefer how Telligent philosophy of function over form. They have the Nerf guns and scooters all over, but that can be had at Toys’R'Us for a few hundred no problem. When it comes to the office itself, there is much more focus on being modest. I mean, for a while ago, the CTO, Jason Alexander, was sharing a conference room with 4-5 interns as his “office”.

But I’m still left with the question… to what purpose who impressive offices serve start-ups? Who exactly are they trying to impress?

Perhap I’m biased since I didn’t go to a Start-up training camp Harvard, Stanford, MIT, or any one of the Ivy league tech colleges… I wasn’t indoctrinated with the VC funded start-up mentality.

I decided to take a stab at the “How did you get started in software development?” Had typed this up a few weeks ago, but hadn’t finished it off for posting.

How old were you when you started programming? How did you get started in programming?

My first “programming” was probably around the 6th-7th grade. A neighbor of mine wrote a lottery program in BASIC, and I was interested, so I got my own copy of Visual Basic (2.0?). At the time, my mom had gone back to college to finish off her degree, so she bought VB for me through the college. I remember being astounded in the bookstore at the wall of software they had and the discounts.

What was your first language?

My first language was Visual Basic. I’ve moved on since.

What was the first real program you wrote?

This one probably needs a little bit of backstory. In 1994, I found the internet through Prodigy Online (ooo), after realizing it had more to offer than Prodigy, I left Prodigy for an ISP. Around then, I also discovered web design and started HTML. I created a website called Gamers Inn, which grew for a few years and was pretty good, though eventually got notified about trademark infringement as some company had that name trademarked and they wanted the domain. So I renamed it. Then I got another trademark infringement, renamed again. Then I think I got one more, and I gave up and closed the site down. Ahh, the early days of web 1.0 when companies were discovering the internet and liked to think trademarks included instant ownership of domain names. I was only like 14 at the time, so when a lawyer from AT&T contacts you about a trademark for a child company of theirs, I complied, and I also paid for my new domain name out of pocket (which was like $50/yr back then, I believe).

Anyway, during the course of working on the site, I got involved with a group of gamers who played the game Descent online (Kali/Kahn days) and they had their own player ranking schema. When I joined, it was all spreadsheet based, though I rewrite it as an automated system in Perl. Players would have a match, each would submit the results, it would compare them and then recalculate standings. At the time, I hadn’t really used SQL yet, so my “database” was a flat text file. I was also working on rewriting it in C. Web app using plain C? *shutter*

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Visual Basic, Perl, C/C++, Assembler, SQL (MySQL and MS SQL), ASP, PHP, C#, and most recently, Ruby. I can read VB.NET, but don’t write it anymore. I can read Java since it is quite close to C#, but only wrote a little towards the end of college, since they were slowly cutting out C++ and moving entirely to Java. Sadly at college, I never got exposed to .NET, I learned it on my own as I was doing ASP at my job at the time, and got into .NET from learning ASP (thinking ASP.NET was like ASP… thankfully, no). At my job though, they didn’t want to touch .NET, “we’re all J2EE” (aside from the one ASP app I worked on).

What was your first professional programming gig?

Around 1995, I was paid $150 to write a little Perl script for this hospital that one of the guys from the gaming group worked for. He was their IT Director and they needed something for making baby photos accessible online. Nurses would take pictures of newborns, FTP them to this server, then parents could give distant relatives this codephrase (a directory name) and it would display the photo and stats (from a text file) to the relatives. I don’t know if it was every actually put to use, but I just thought it was cool that I made $150.

As far as getting a paycheck, it was 2001 when I got a Student Assistant job with the CA DMV. They found out I knew how to program, so I took over maintenance and further development of this ASP application after the contractors who wrote it left. They didn’t have any staff employees who knew ASP/SQL (they were all J2EE and Cobol), so they had me take over. Of course, they couldn’t have a student assistant as the owner of this “enterprise application” on paper for higher ups, so they actually assigned it to this other guy who was taking HTML and javascript classes at the local JC, both of which were useless for the application (it did very, very little javascript). I was getting paid $8.25/hour to maintain it while the staff employee got paid ~$60k/yr and read more newspapers end-to-end a day then anyone I’ve ever known. Don’t work for the government. But it was a great learning experience, got me into .NET by starting me on ASP, and was a good example of both how to and how not to run projects.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes.

If there is one thing that you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Coding is not developing. There is far more to it than “the code”. In college, I met a number of bright people, but some of them would completely miss the mark because they only thought of the code, and not of the program. Users use the program, not the code.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Fun is hard to define. At the DMV, when the application I was working on was first going into production, it was kind of fun. I wasn’t responsible for it, so I wasn’t stressed (it was late and overbudget, of course), I was just working on some extra reporting stuff. Had a lot of fun building some of the elaborate SQL queries. I was oddly excited at my first 12 hour day (which I couldn’t get paid overtime, but my boss worked a deal so I’d get time and a half in PTO). The early days at Telligent were a lot of fun, when it was just like a half dozen of us, and I was doing stuff like the FTP and NNTP add-ons. It was fun to see Outlook Express working with content from a web site.

I’ve always enjoyed my own little hobby development. I hadn’t done much for a long time, but been doing some Ruby here and there now and like it a lot. Not doing anything groundbreaking, but just working on some stuff that I’d get to enjoy (maybe blog about it soon).

Recently came upon the realization of how poorly Wells Fargo has their Online Bill Pay system set up. It is so flawed and useless, I can barely fathom who thought this thing up.

#1 – Payment Sent vs Payment Received

First, one thing it does that is completely illogical is that you don’t pick what day the payee gets paid on, you pick the day the payment gets sent. For instance, say your electric bill is $200 and is do on the 17th, it would seem entirely logical to go the screen, type in $200, pick the 17th, and click send, but NO. They have to be complicated. You pick the day it gets sent on, so if your bill is due the 17th, and it takes 2 business days to send the payment, you need to enter in the 15th. This seems completely counter intuitive, not user friendly at all, and bit me a few times the first time I started using the service.

On top of that, each payee has different time it takes to send. Your utility bill could take 2 business days, your cable bill take 3 business days, and people not in their database of payees (like my landlord) take 5 business days. So paying multiple bills takes more thought than I really want to put into it. I hate paying bills, but it is a necessity of life. They know how long it takes to send the payment. Why can’t their little computer system figure it out? “Ohh, they want it paid the 17th? This payee takes 2 days, so we’ll schedule it on the 15th”.

#2 – When they take money out of your account

I recently found out that they take the money out of your account when they send the payment, so when it posts to your account, it doesn’t mean the company got your payment, it means Wells Fargo paid the company that sends the check for them. Why does this suck? Because I pay my landlord through Wells Fargo bill pay and was seeing the money consistently taken out on the 1st/2nd. I had her on auto-pay, so never thought twice about it. Come to find out she was getting it on the 5th (close to the deadline), and I was late this month (more on the why there later).

This really irks me because traditionally, when something posts to your checking account, it is paid! Checks, ATM transactions, transfers, etc. If you have a billing dispute with a company, you may not realize it doesn’t reflect when they got their money.

Additionally, I am a stickler for my budgeting system and categorizing of transactions. I want my July rent to be withdrawn in July. I don’t want it to be in the end of June. So for me to pay my landlord sooner, I’d need to schedule the transaction earlier. Really minor, but it screws up my filing system for those bills that are due at the beginning of the month. Minor, yes, but annoying to need to alter the way I do things for this poorly designed system.

#3 – Flawed automatic payments

This builds on #1 a little bit further. The amount of extra thought you need to put into scheduling regular auto-pays just compounds the complexities mentioned before. Just follow these steps and exceptions you need to account for because they don’t do the math:

• Say your rent is due on the 1st, and late on the 2nd (my landlord isn’t a big stickler, but maybe your utility/mortgage/other company is).
• It takes 5 days to pay them.
• August 1st will be their first auto-payment, a Friday.
• Using their software, you figure you need to send the payment on Monday, July 28th.
• So now, Wells Fargo will send the check on the 28th of each month.
• But wait! It takes 5 business days. What if the first falls on a weekend or on a Monday?
• So you need to change it to send it earlier. First, they don’t exactly explain what happens if the day to send the payment falls on the weekend. Does it send it the Friday before, or the Monday after? Big thing there. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume it sends it the Friday before, so you can set it to the 26th, and if that is a weekend, it will send it the 25th (I hope).
• But wait! You haven’t out smarted the system yet! What about holidays? This was what bit me this month, Friday was the 4th of July, no mail, so my rent payment took an extra physical day. So ignoring Thanksgiving (a 2 day holiday), you need to schedule your payment earlier! Schedule it for the 25th so you can account for when there is a holiday during the time payment is sent and payment is received.
• Haha! You’ve out smarted them! Or so you thought. Remember, not all months are equal. You might be fine for a while and never even think about it, but what about time that will eventually happen where it is February and there is a weekend between the send date and the delivery date? This will make you days late, despite all your careful planning for weekends and holidays. Say February 25th is a Friday, which would make March 1st the following Tuesday. Using the careful planning we did before, your payment wouldn’t arrive until March 3rd, a full two days late.

So now you need to plan everything as if it was February, and change your bills to be sent no later than the 23rd of the month if you want them paid by the 1st. So a quick recap of all the steps just to figure out “when should it pay this bill?”:

1. When is it due?
2. What if there is a weekend?
3. What will it do when the send date is on a weekend?
4. What about a holiday?
5. What about February?

So in this day of Web 2.0/2.5/3.0, I can’t understand why I can’t tell Wells Fargo just when my bill is due and let them deal with the complex mumbo jumbo. I know banks are basically still on Web 0.5 in many cases, but I consider something like this so fundamentally flawed and confusing that it makes you wonder if the authors of the software or executives at Wells Fargo have ever actually used their own website. The first time you use it and see their little calendar pop up, you’ll be confused. And on the page to create an automatic payment, it doesn’t have the useful calendar pop-up, and no information about how things can affect the day the bill is actually paid on. Additionally, with them taking out the money early, it will give you a false sense of security that everything is paid on time and all is well.

Wells Fargo BillPay = FAIL

Twitter is probably one of Web 2.0’s most successful failures. Despite doing just about everything wrong, they have managed to hold onto their popularity and market share. It is rather surprising how despite more consistent downtime than uptime, continually turning off features to rewrite them time and time again, and quite frankly, horrid handling of their issues.

The way they handle turning off features has got to be among the worst. First, they have a “Read the Twitter Status blog for updates about the service” banner on your page, but it is always there so no one is going to be too inclined to check it regularly. They’re always having some sort of issue. But how do they handle turning off the Replies tab and pagination?

Ohh no, that doesn’t show up when you hover over it, no, that shows up when you click on it. When they first pulled that trick on the pagination, I had clicked to go to the next page, switched to another tab, came back a minute later, and was like “what the heck?” Did it again, same thing. Finally on the third try, I noticed something popped up when I clicked it, but disappeared when I moved off the button. In terms of user-friendliness, that sure has to get an F.

I read on Twitter’s blog last month that Twitter doesn’t have any public relations people. Seriously, go out today and hire one, Twitter! Sure, people like DHH tout startups shouldn’t hire PR staff, however Twitter is way beyond that stage. Twitter is more known for their issues than anything else. Twitter’s downtime laughable. They’re the butt of their own joke. First, fix the shit! That is wishful thinking, but seriously, how many times do you need to rewrite a feature on the site to get it right? When something breaks, they should ensure it is fixed the right way. Second, hire some PR firm familiar with startups and work repairing that bad rep. But the only way to repair it is to first stop perpetuating it.

And yet somehow they managed to raise $15 million in Series C funding just last month. They sure as hell must have an awesome presentation to VCs, since given everything they do wrong and their lack of any way to produce revenue so far, I wouldn’t give them a penny. From my point of view, Twitter just looks like a sinking ship, with everyone just kind of hanging around enjoying the free ride.

In general though, ripping on Twitter is like beating a dead horse.

In late December is when I finally took the plunge and bought my first Mac. Since I did most of my work from my desktop, a Mac Pro made better sense. My laptop was much more of an after-hours machine that I used from the living room at night, or on when I travel (which isn’t that much).

I had fallen in love with the Mac, and it really helped me re-realize my love for the command line from my old Linux days. Shortly after getting into Ruby, I had paved my laptop to put Ubuntu on it and had started doing my Ruby coding on it with Gedit. However, it left me with multiple platforms, different programs available for each, and unable to do .NET work on my laptop, since my VMware Workstation license was only for Windows.

So last month, shortly before my trip to TelligentHQ for the Community Server 2008 Launch Party, I decided to finally purchase a MacBook Pro… and I couldn’t be happier.

I ended up buying a slightly used one (ie, <6 months old) off Ebay rather than buy a new one. I had been watching Ebay for a while and finally found the deal I was waiting for. 17″, high-resolution, 4gb ram, 7200rpm hard drive. Near top specs for a good chunk under retail. Additionally, since it wasn’t the newest model, it was cheaper than a new model one with the same specs. I figure with the previous model, all I’m missing is an LED display, the Penren (which maybe adds a few MB CPU cache), and multi-touch. Overall, it still a screaming machine and will last just as long, but saved some good change.

I had been milling over the 15″ over the 17″ for a while, but in the end, I am very happy with the 17″. It is no where near as bulky as I expected, it is actually shorter than my 15″ Thinkpad T60 since Apple makes much better use of the space, and at 1920×1200, the display is magnificent.

Now I am working on my multi-Mac bliss. Some things are a true gem… TextMate is love. I use it for everything. Even drafting up blog posts (like this one). Syntonization with .Mac rocks, as I can share mail account configurations, 1Password entries, Transmit favorites, and more. Having SSH in the OS is revolutionary. With one secure port open, I can tunnel VNC, access command line on my desktop, and even access my files (SFTP or sshfs with MacFUSE).

Even better, can use VMware Fusion on both and have the exact same .NET development environment on both. Development with a VM is so much better. I can have one pristine environment, easily create/manage snapshots and multiple backups of it. If Visual Studio gets testy, can easily reboot without having to close out everything.

Overall, I’ve been very pleased with my move to the Mac. Almost all my everyday programs have been replaced, I’ve gotten into broadening my horizons, and even find developing on .NET better as a result. I think the next stage would be getting a nice development story with TextMate + Mono… ohh, one can dream, can’t I?